“Attempts were made to erase” record of hemorrhaging Planned Parenthood patient

On August 9, 2016, an ambulance transported a hemorrhaging, asthmatic patient from the Planned Parenthood in Madison, Wisconsin, to a local hospital. But despite the filing of a Freedom of Information Request on the incident, Operation Rescue reports that even full audio of the 911 call was redacted from some of the released records — as if no ambulance call even took place at the time.

After filing a FIFA request on the incident, Operation Rescue realized that both the 911 call audio and the incident report “were so heavily redacted that there was no way to determine what the medical emergency was about” (emphasis added):

After the medical emergency was first reported by local pro-life activist Dan Miller, Operation Rescue placed a Freedom of Information Request for the 911 call records. The Dane County Public Safety Communications office released an audio file of the call and the CAD Incident Detail Report, but both were so heavily redacted that there was no way to determine what the medical emergency was about.

However, once Operation Rescue reviewed raw radio traffic that it obtained apart from the Public Safety Communications office, it became obvious that something was amiss.

Despite a clear record in the heavily redacted CAD report, which showed Medic Unit 8 was dispatched at 11:42 a.m., there was no record in the Fire Department radio traffic that any units had been dispatched to Planned Parenthood.

Photo of dispatch timeline via Operation Rescue

Audio of the 911 call issued after OR’s FIFA request is also so heavily redacted that it includes no details other than the location of the emergency. Listen on Operation Rescue’s website.

Operation Rescue president Troy Newman stated, “It appears that not only were the records we asked for redacted, but attempts were made to erase any mention of the incident from the radio traffic recordings as well.”

However, after doing some more searching, OR staff discovered a different recording that helped them to determine what had really happened during the emergency:

At 11:59 a.m., a responder from Medic Unit 8 radioed a hospital to describe the condition of a patient he was transporting to the emergency room.

“There’s about a liter and a half of blood loss,” he began. “She was hypotensive and tachycardic at the clinic there.”

In layman’s terms, the hemorrhaging patient had low blood pressure, presumably from the heavy blood loss, and as a result, her heart began to beat faster than normal.

The abortion facility had established an IV and pumped about 400 ccs of fluid into her, which is the equivalent to just over 13.5 ounces — a long way from the 1.5 liters (nearly 51 ounces) of blood she had lost.

As the ambulance sped toward the unnamed hospital, the woman’s heartbeat was still a bit high at 102 beats per minute, but her blood pressure had stabilized. The patient was also asthmatic, which was preventing full oxygenation.

Listen to the audio, provided by Operation Rescue, below:

This stifling of information may protect Planned Parenthood, but it puts women at greater risk, notes OR’s Newman.

“Whoever is over-redacting public information from the records and covering up for Planned Parenthood,” he says, “is only creating an even more dangerous environment for women, who are denied access to information about the risks they face.”